Have local governments failed in response to the latest pandemic?
The purpose of the Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) Program is to provide federal grants to States to assist State, local, territorial, and tribal governments in preparing for all hazards. Title VI of the Stafford Act authorizes FEMA to make grants for the purpose of providing a system of emergency preparedness for the protection of life and property in the United States from hazards and to vest responsibility for emergency preparedness jointly in the federal government and the states and their political subdivisions.
So, the money has been available, and localities have been taking it, yet what they have been doing with it is dubious.
In an interview from January 2019, Georgetown Professor Steven Hatfill warned of a new flu pandemic in U.S., and how local governments were not going to be prepared:
Paul Plante says
I don’t know about anywhere else, but in New York, of course they were caught off-guard, and that is because the system of public health protection in New York is a politicized mess and a worthless, ineffectual patronage mill, as we can see in the transcript of a press briefing by America’s governor, the corrupt Democratic Socialist Andy Cuomo of New York, to wit:
Apr 6, 2020
Gov Andrew Cuomo New York COVID-19 Briefing Transcript April 6, 2020
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: (12:55)
This is an enemy that we have underestimated from day one and we have paid the price dearly.
end quote
What “we,” Andy?
This is an enemy that Andy Cuomo, who has never given a damn about the health of the people of New York outside of New York, underestimated because he broke the system that should have been on the alert months ago, but wasn’t because that system no longer exists.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: (17:18)
We’re also very aware of the mental health aspect of this situation and the stress and the isolation that this has caused and people are trying in their own way to grapple with what this means and what is the impact, how do you rationalize this situation?
And the mental health aspect of it is very real.
end quotes
Indeed it is very real, and I am amazed by all these people in here who appear to slough off that hidden aspect of this police state that has been imposed on us to cause the social isolation that is going to result in all those new mental problems caused by Andy Cuomo being asleep at the switch with regard to COVID.
And here is our Andy waxing hysterical, to keep other people hysterical, off-balance, and unable to think clearly as Andy Cuomo dismantles constitutional government in the state of New York, including suspending the law that kept criminals, i.e. pedophile sex offenders who prey on our children and grand children from being able to open child day-care centers or work in them, or even be near them:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: (18:53)
Perspective, we like to think that we can control everything.
We can’t.
We like to think that we can fix everything and fix all the problems for people.
We can’t.
The undeniable truth here is that this virus is a deadly enemy and we will lose and we are losing people who are vulnerable to the virus.
That can’t be controlled, that can’t be fixed.
Why?
That’s mother nature.
That’s a question that God can only answer.
But control what you can, do what you can.
The challenge is to make sure that we don’t lose anyone who could have been saved if our healthcare system was operating fully.
end quotes
And our healthcare system isn’t operating fully because it was never intended to be able to deal with an emergency.
It should have been, but it is a for-profit system run by lawyers and bean counters, and they never prepared for something like this because it would have robbed their investors of profits, plain and simple.
There are no mysteries here as to why this mess is all happening in New York, anyway – it is due to callous disregard for people’s health and gross negligence.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: (20:43)
And we are still New York Tough.
And New York Tough means tough.
But, tough in a New York sense also means compassionate.
It means that we are unified.
It means that we are loving because if you’re really tough … the really tough guys, they’re tough enough to show love.
And because we’re smart and that’s how we’re going to get through this.
end quotes
What tripe!
“New York tough,” Andy?
How about NEW YORK STUPID!
And here we come to the best part of Andy’s latest address, where he admits to gross negligence on his part as governor for breaking our public health system, to wit:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: (35:51)
And we have been behind on this virus from day one.
And this virus has kicked our rear-end and we underestimate this virus at our own peril.
end quote
How pathetic!
David Moore says
He’s EXACTLY like every other LIBERAL Governor or Mayor in this country!
David Moore says
If the do nothing, impeachment lunatics, America hating, PC liberals spent less time trying to bring down our President and destroying this country then POSSIBLY these cities & localities would have the proper protective gear they so desperately need! You can bet your last dollar they will be ready NEXT TIME..And there will be a next time!
Paul Plante says
With regard to this sentence in the original post, “So, the money has been available, and localities have been taking it, yet what they have been doing with it is dubious,” there is no mystery as to where that money has been going in corrupt New York state, the government of which is nothing more than one huge patronage mill, which takes us back to 4 February 2016, and a response of mine as an associate level public health engineer in New York to an article on the subject of a broken and unresponsive public health system in New York by Chris Churchill of the Albany, New York Times Union, wherein I recounted the history of the corrupt and broken public health system in New York state, as follows:
In your article “Churchill: Worried about the future in Hoosick Falls” published Saturday, January 30, 2016, you pose the following rhetorical question, to wit: Is it any wonder that so many Americans have lost faith in government?
And of course, looking at history in Rensselaer County specifically, and New York state generally, the answer is clearly no, it is no wonder so many Americans have lost faith in government.
With respect to your recent story referenced above, if one were to look for a classic textbook case of denial of honest services causing harm to the public at large, one could not find a better example than what is going on right now in Hoosick Falls in Rensselaer County in upstate New York, which is known as a “Cauldron of Corruption” where the culture of corruption grows like barnacles on a boat bottom.
As you and your paper note, we have a lot of hand-wringing going on now, and famous people like Erin Brockovich coming on the scene to get their names in the papers and their faces on TV, and U.S. senator Charley Schumer also gets to get his name in the papers and his face on TV, but the truth of the matter is that this groundwater contamination problem in Hoosick Falls specifically, and in Rensselaer County generally, has been known about by public officials since at least 1986, when the now-defunct Capital Land magazine appeared on newsstands with a blaring front-page headline that read “DON’T DRINK THE WATER!”
1986, Chris.
Think about that for a moment, how long this cover-up of groundwater contamination problems in Rensselaer County has been going on, and who has been involved in that cover-up, starting with your own newspaper.
Go back to 10 January 1988 and the story “Developers see a zealot in new county health officer” by Laurie Anderson in the Times Union, wherein was stated “Plante is involved in several fierce feuds with developers, the most public of which involves Anderson, who is attempting to rally the county legislature, Buono, and the state Health Department to make Plante more compliant.”
As you bemoan these groundwater contamination issues in Hoosick Falls today, Chris, meditate for a moment on that phrase “to make Plante more compliant.”
As a wordsmith, I trust you know what the word “compliant” means when it is applied to someone like myself whose duty it was as the “new county health officer” to protect the groundwater for the people of Hoosick Falls and Rensselaer County.
“Compliant” means willing to turn one’s back and look the other way, doesn’t it?
“Compliant” in someone whose duty it was to enforce the Public Health Law in the Rensselaer County Health District means “sleazy” and “untrustworthy,” does it not?
But in the political context, “compliant” means politically reliable, willing to accept bribes and look the other way, which I was not, and so I had to go.
I had to go because on October 11, 1988, and Fred LeBrun will clearly recall this, as he was vilifying me in your paper at that time, I had the temerity to tell John Buono, the Rensselaer County Executive in writing that as the Director of the Environmental Health Division, it was my responsibility to certify on behalf of Rensselaer County the integrity of the Code Enforcement Programs to the State of New York for the purpose of payment of our State operating funds, and I had reached a juncture where such certification by myself was no longer feasible.
end quotes
Let me interject here that in addition to signing for state funds, I was also signing for federal funds flowing down to the local, supposedly to strengthen the public health infrastructure in America where the first line of defense is at the local level, not the federal level, which is far too cumbersome and distant to be of any real use in a public health emergency like a disease outbreak, which is what the system of public health in America is supposed to be for, controlling the outbreak of disease at the local level, if that system were not broken, worthless and unaccountable to anybody, because nobody ever comes looking for where those funds have disappeared to.
I was the odd man out for not engaging in the misfeasance and malfeasance and outright stealing myself, and I was the only person ever severely punished in New York state in connection with that missing money, and that was for blowing the whistle on the stealing, not for participating in it as was expected of me as an engineer in a corrupt and broken system of public health, which takes us back to my 4 February 2016 writing on the subject., to wit:
I informed John Buono in that writing that my certification of the operations of the Environmental Health Division of the Rensselaer County Health Department was as a licensed professional, and that my conduct was governed by Part 29 of the Codes of the Education Department which set forth the actions deemed to constitute unprofessional conduct on the part of licensed individuals in Rensselaer County and New York state.
end quotes
And for that I was deemed quite impertinent and insubordinate, as can clearly be seen by going back to March 13, 1989, and what was known in corrupt New York state as the “Trial of the Century” by all the local media who were there in droves each day with the pencils and note pads if reporters, or TV cameras for the other crowd to record for posterity the Dien Bien Phu of public health in New York state, and in support of that destruction, Rensselaer County Personnel Director Felix “Iron Felix” Pugliese is on the witness stand, expounding to all assembled, to include TV Channel 13 broadcasting out of Menands, New York, and the Albany, New York Times Union, along with the United States Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, and WE, THE PEOPLE, on why it was necessary for Rensselaer County Executive John L. “Smiling Jack” Buono to fire the Rensselaer County Associate Public Health Engineer, to wit:.
INTERLOCUTOR: I quess what I’m trying to get at is whether you inquired whether the incidents (of alleged insubordination) that Mr. Van Praag was telling you about involved engineering judgment?
PUGLIESE: No, I did not ….
INTERLOCUTOR: Since you’ve agreed that Mr. Van Praag is not qualified to make engineering judgments, why didn’t you make that inquiry?
PUGLIESE: Because it didn’t seem to me to be pertinent to the type of the discussion we were having.
It wasn’t a matter of whether he was qualified to do something or not.
It was a discussion boiled down to the fact that the relationship between supervisor and employee had degraded to the point where they were refusing, the employee was refusing to communicate and to take general instructions and orders from the department head.
end quotes
Not to put too fine a point on it, but what I was actually doing was preparing felony charges against my “supervisor” for willful violation of the NYS Education Law which makes it a Class E felony for people like my “supervisor” to practice engineering without a license.
Getting back to the drama:
PUGLIESE: Had nothing to do with whether he was responsible for an area or not.
INTERLOCUTOR: During this consultation which you indicated took an hour did Mr. Van Praag tell you that Mr. Plante was having frequent discussions concerning his job responsibilities vis a vis Mr. Van Praag with Deputy Rensselaer County Executive James Girzone?
PUGLIESE: No …..
INTERLOCUTOR: Now, in the consultation with Mr. Van Praag, did he tell you that Mr. Plante had written a memo to John Buono about the integrity of the Environmental Health program?
PUGLIESE: No …..
INTERLOCUTOR: I’m showing you, Mr. Pugliese, a memo from Mr. Plante to Mr. John Buono, County Executive, dated October 11, 1988, not signed or initialed, and what I want to ask you is do you recall whether Mr. Van Praag showed you this memo during the conversation that you had?
PUGLIESE: No ….
INTERLOCUTOR: Do you know whether you had your conversation with Mr. Van Praag before or after October 11, 1988?
PUGLIESE: I can’t be positive ….
I don’t know what date we spoke ….
But I would tend to think it was some time ……
I don’t know ….
I don’t recall …..
INTERLOCUTOR: Okay, did Mr. Van Praag, during the consultation that you had with Mr. Van Praag, did he tell you that Mr. Plante had stated to him or indicated to him that a definition of authority and reposnsibility between Mr. Plante as Director of the Division of Environmental Health and Mr. Van Praag as the Director of the Department of Health was necessary?
PUGLIESE: Your questions are so long I lose track of what the question is ……
INTERLOCUTOR: I’ll rephrase it …..
During the consultation that you had with Mr. Van Praag, did Mr. Van Praag inform you or indicate to you that Mr. Plante had pointed out to either Mr. Van Praag or to Mr. Buono that there was a problem with the lines of authority in the County Health Department between the Director of the Division of Environmental Health, Mr. Plante, and Mr. Van Praag?
PUGLIESE: No ….
INTERLOCUTOR: He didn’t point that out to you?
PUGLIESE: No …..
INTERLOCUTOR: Did Mr. Van Praag tell you that Mr. Plante had indicated that he might not certify the County health program for the next year?
PUGLIESE: No …..
INTERLOCUTOR: Other than Mr. Van Praag telling you that Mr. Plante had told his staff that media requests should be directed to Mr. Plante, other than that, what else did Mr. Van Praag tell you?
PUGLIESE: That Mr. Plante had indicated to him that he was independent and did not take direction from Mr. Van Praag and that Mr. Van Praag did not have any authority over people that were organizationally reporting to Mr. Plante.
In general, it was almost like there was a renegade situation in that Mr. Plante was operating under his own rules.
INTERLOCUTOR: Did Mr. Van Praag ….
Did you discuss with Mr. Van Praag what it meant for the public, for the Director of the Environmental Health Division to exercise independent judgment in overseeing the operation of the Division of Environmental Health?
PUGLIESE: No …
INTERLOCUTOR: Well, as the official responsible for administering the County Employment Department, what does it mean in Mr. Plante’s job description when it says that he should have “A considerable leeway allowed for the exercise of independent judgment in overseeing the operations of the Division of Environmental Health”?
PUGLIESE: I believe it means that Mr. Plante has in his capacity the ability or should have the ability to function as he sees fit until some point in time when his supervisor instructs him to either do something particular, and in this particular case that we kept referring to, or you kept referring to in terms of the media, there was a discussion and the supervisor said I want it done this way.
At that point in time, we don’t allow independent thinking.
end quotes
And that bit of actual history brings us back to the 4 February 2016 to the Times Union hack, as follows:
I informed John Buono on that date that section 29.1(b)(6) of those rules defined unprofessional conduct as “willfully making or filing a false report, or failing to file a report required by law or by the Education Department, or willfully impeding or obstructing such filing, or inducing another person to do so.”
I told John Buono in that writing that I could no longer vouch for the integrity of the Environmental Health Division programs and would not place my professional standing in jeopardy by doing so.
In that writing, I told John Buono that it was my professional opinion stated in writing to him that the programs I was responsible for had been very seriously undermined and compromised.
I told him that as my internal investigation proceeded, the probability of actions for damages against the Department increased, due to errors of omission and commission of former engineers and the Public Health Director.
I told John Buono that as the Public Health Law required me to conduct investigations into incidents involving public health nuisance or hazard, I found myself in the course of such investigation returning to the files of the Rensselaer County Health Department where I kept finding consistent violation of code on the part of County staff.
For that, as your paper gleefully reported, I was declared to be mentally ill by John Buono, I was locked out of my office, my investigation files of groundwater contamination in Rensselaer County, including Hoosick Falls, were systematically destroyed, and I was fired.
And now, all these years later, the Times Union is fretting about the groundwater contamination problems in Hoosick Falls that it helped to create back in 1988.
So Chris, is it any wonder that so many Americans have lost faith in government?
Think about it.
Sincerely,
Paul R. Plante, P.E.
Paul Plante says
Speaking about not being prepared, which is an understatement, given our public health surveillance system in New York, not surprisingly the epicenter of this COVID CRISIS, was purposefully dismantled by the Cuomo’s, father Mario and son Andy, and putting control of people’s healthcare during this crisis into the hands of a hack lawyer who knows absolutely nothing about public health or medicine, yet still gives out orders for people’s treatment as if he were qualified to practice medicine, let’s go back for a moment to his “Gov Andrew Cuomo New York COVID-19 Briefing Transcript April 6,” on the subject of all the ventilators Doctor Andy is ordering people to be put on, to wit:
Speaker 5: What percentage of available ventilators in New York are being used today?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: All of them.
We’re beyond capacity.
Speaker 6: What about the remaining stockpile, how much remains in the state’s stockpile?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: We’re beyond capacity.
We are into the plan B, C, D that we outlined, right.
We are into using BiPAP machines instead of ventilators.
We’re into splitting ventilators, turning two into one with two sets of tubes.
We are into all backup plans that we had.
Speaker 7: So how many ventilators are still in the state stockpile though at this point?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: The stockpile, I don’t know, I can get you the number, but we are over capacity for the number of ventilators in the whole system.
We’re using BiPAP machines, we’re using, splitting, et cetera.
Speaker 7: I guess that begs the question, why not … if there are still ventilators in the state stockpile, why don’t you send them to New York, to the city?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: No, we don’t have anyone who says they need them now, who doesn’t have them.
Speaker 7: But you just said they’re over capacity.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: Well, they’re using plan B, C, D.
We can’t give everybody a ventilator for every situation.
We have 9,000 BiPAP machines, for example.
We’re using the BiPAP machines, we’re using the other machines.
Speaker 14: [inaudible] have been moved to downstate?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: We are moving ventilators now among the system.
When someone has a change in patient load and they have additional ventilators, we move ventilators.
But we have moved thousands and thousands of ventilators throughout the system.
We’ve acquired thousands and thousands of ventilators.
I also want to thank Oregon for sending ventilators.
I want to thank the State of Washington for releasing ventilators and suggest that they be sent here.
I want to thank California that also this morning released ventilators because they thought that they could be helpful to New York.
That is the right attitude.
That’s the only way we do this as a nation.
We’re going to have to be flexible and handle the surge as it moves across the country.
That’s just what we’re doing here in this state.
Surges in Nassau, one night we move assets to Nassau.
It surges in Rockland, we move assets to Rockland.
So that’s the only way we’re going to do it because, well, the federal stockpile, federal stockpile, if the federal stockpile has 9,000 ventilators or 10,000 ventilators, that’s not going to do, it’s not going to be enough for a nation, right?
end quotes
Now, let us go to the New York Post to see what a real doctor treating COVID patients has to say about the medical advice the ignorant hack thug lawyer Andy Cuomo is forcing on people with all these ventilators, which not surprisingly, are doing more harm than good, to wit:
“NYC doctor says high ventilator settings damage coronavirus patients’ lungs”
By Lorena Mongelli, Jackie Salo and Bruce Golding
April 6, 2020 | 3:03pm
A Brooklyn doctor is warning that critically ill coronavirus patients are being inadvertently harmed by the very same breathing machines being used to keep them alive.
In a video posted on YouTube, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell, an emergency medicine physician at Maimonides Medical Center, said that “we are putting breathing tubes in people and putting them on ventilators and dialing up the pressure to open up their lungs.”
“I’ve talked to doctors all around the country and it is becoming increasingly clear that the pressure we’re providing may be hurting their lungs, that it is highly likely that the high pressures we’re using are damaging the lungs of the patients we are putting the breathing tubes in,” he said in a two-minute video he posted Wednesday.
end quotes
There is what happens in a third-world socialist dictatorship where the GREAT LEADER, be it a Saddam Hussein, or Idi Amin, and “Pa Pa Doc” Duvalier, or in this case, a hack lawyer like Andy Cuomo, thinks they are the smartest person in the room, especially when it comes to people’s health care, which GREAT LEADER Andy Cuomo has never had any concerns about before (see, TALK-1300 REPORT http://thelivyjrfiles.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=139 ) – they end up hurting and killing people!
Getting back to the NY Post article:
Kyle-Sidell, who’s board-certified in emergency medicine, didn’t return a message from The Post, but he told WebMd’s Medscape website that his beliefs led him to “step down from my position in the ICU.”
“We ran into an impasse where I could not morally, in a patient-doctor relationship, I could not continue the current protocols which again, are the protocols at the top hospitals in the country,” he said in a video interview posted Monday.
“So now I’m back in the ER where we are setting up slightly different ventilation strategies.”
end quotes
When he refers to current protocols in New York state, he is referring to Edicts of Andy Cuomo that everyone with COVID be put on a ventilator, which takes us back to the NY Post, as follows:
In his Wednesday YouTube video, Kyle-Sidell described the situation involving the ventilator settings as “not our fault.”
“We didn’t know.”
end quotes
Nor does Andy Cuomo and that gutless weakling Howie Zucker, who is Cuomo’s health commissioner, but that doesn’t stop Andy from issuing his orders to ventilate everyone, because Andy always knows best.
Getting back to the Post:
But Kyle-Sidell insisted that “we need to change those protocols” and cautioned that “the time for us to change them is rapidly diminishing.”
“COVID-positive patients need oxygen.”
“They do not need pressure,” he said.
“They will need ventilators — but they must be programmed differently.”
end quotes
And of course, that is going to have to be approved by Saddam Cuomo, who is the man in charge here, and if that change is going to make Andy look stupid or a fool, or incompetent, it will not happen, and Cuomo will make this doctor out to be incompetent, instead, because if there is one thing you don’t do with a thug like Andy Cuomo who rules by instilling fear in people, it’s to talk back to him and tell him he is wrong.
As to COVID, this is what a real doctor has to say about it:
In another video posted Sunday, Kyle-Sidell described COVID-19 as “a disease that does not make sense to us — a disease for which our usual treatment does not work.”
“Some are questioning whether this is a lung disease causing blood problems or a blood disease causing lung problems,” he said.
“I don’t know what it is, but I know that I have never seen it before.”
“People are dying of a disease we don’t understand, thousand of people, old and young, and yes, there are young people dying.”
Kyle-Sidell has also said that “COVID-19 lung disease, as far as I can see, is not a pneumonia” but seems to be “some kind of viral-induced disease most resembling high altitude sickness.”
“It is as if tens of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers are on a plane at 30,000 feet and the cabin pressure is slowly being let out,” he said in a video posted Tuesday.
“These patients are slowly being starved of oxygen … and while they look like patients absolutely on the brink of death, they do not look like patients dying of pneumonia.”
James Cai, a physician assistant who was New Jersey’s first coronavirus patient, told The Post that he agreed with Kyle-Sidell’s observations and conclusions, based on his own experience in beating the deadly disease.
Cai noted that the “muscle of the lung in ARDS patient doesn’t work properly but muscle in COVID-19 patient works just fine.”
“So [a] ventilator is actually doing more harm to [the] lung when it happens.”
“It is a new disease and none of the American doctors have encountered it in their lives, not in textbook and they are figuring things out by experience!” he added.
“They really need help because thousands of thousands [of] Americans’ lives are on the line!”
end quotes
What they really need is for this stupid Andy Cuomo to shut his ******* running mouth and go to his room and stay there, out of sight, until this COVID thing is over, so the real professionals can do their work without that idiot looking over their shoulder and telling them how things should be done.
Hey Andy, how many people have you killed today with your medical advice?
The candid world would truly like to know.
Paul Plante says
It seems so quaint today to be coming in here, in the midst of public health pandemonium in the United States of America caused by the gutting and dismantling of our PUBLIC HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE in this country that was actually a part of another one of those government AFTER-ACTION REPORTS that keep some people in Washington busy for awhile when they otherwise would likely be unemployed, not being fit for anything outside of playing at politics all the time, which is why our PUBLIC HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE in this country is shot to hell and worthless, to even be talking about our DISMANTLED PUBLIC HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE which is now like some mockery from straight out of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that has failed us so spectacularly as it has with this COVID CRISIS, in this day and age of FOR-PROFIT HEALTHCARE in America, but here it is, anyway, to wit:
NCBI
The Future of the Public’s Health in the 21st Century., continued …
Financial Implications of a Changing Mission for Governmental Public Health Agencies in Providing Health Care Services
Essential public health service number 7 (see Box 3–1) charges state and local governmental public health agencies to “link people to needed personal health services and assure the provision of health care when otherwise unavailable” (Public Health Functions Steering Committee, 1994).
Thus, state and local governmental public health agencies are responsible for providing a safety net to guarantee that personal health care services are available to all members of the communities they serve.
As noted earlier, since 1988, state and local governments have turned increasingly to the private sector, particularly managed care organizations, to provide health care services for Medicaid beneficiaries and others, many of whom were once served directly by local public health departments.
Although there is great potential benefit from collaborations between public health agencies and managed care plans, current economic trends for managed care programs are not optimistic.
In 1997, 67 percent of managed care plans sponsored by safety-net providers lost money, and only 8 percent indicated that they broke even (Gray and Rowe, 2000).
In recent years, managed care organizations have been withdrawing from collaborative contracts with governmental public health agencies, once again leaving these agencies with the pressure of having to deliver personal health care services including primary care services to the uninsured or vulnerable populations rejected by the medical care system.
The committee finds that, as in 1988, the continued lack of a nationwide strategy to ensure adequate financing of personal medical, preventive, and health promotion services will continue to place undue burdens on the public health system and to fragment the provision of personal health care services to those most in need of comprehensive integrated approaches.
end quotes
Coincidentally, in 1988, I became famous in New York state, this at a time when present Democratic Socialist governor Andy Cuomo’s father, “Big Poppy” Cuomo as he was known from his days as a baseball player of some note, said to have had a wicked fastball and a vicious slider, was governor sitting on his throne over in Albany, and son Andy, the present governor in that lineage, having served as his father Mario’s campaign manager during his father’s 1982 campaign for Governor, thereafter joining his father’s staff as one of his father’s policy advisors, including on gutting the PUBLIC HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE in New York state, was at that time, after working as a New York assistant district attorney, working at the law firm of Blutrich, Falcone & Miller, which law firm has quite a colorful history, if one were to bother to google the name of the firm, including that Trump himself used the firm do some of his own legal business, for refusing to sign for state and federal monies that were supposed to be going for the protection and promotion of the health of the 154,000 people of the Rensselaer County Health District in upstate New York right outside of Albany, where father “Big Poppy” Cuomo sat his majestic throne, looking out at all the land and those on it as his possessions and playtoys to do with what he would, just because he had the power to do so, the same power son Andy no wields, but instead were being diverted for political purposes.
And everybody and his brother know that money was being diverted, which is to say, misappropriated, to include the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York, which agency, on the record, stated it saw nothing at all criminal in that misappropriation of funds away from the PUBLIC HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE that has failed us in this COVFID CRISIS, which takes us to a professional medical publication named STAT and an article entitled “A deficit of more than 250,000 public health workers is no way to fight Covid-19” by Robin Taylor Wilson, Catherine L. Troisi, and Tiffany L. Gary-Webb on April 5, 2020, where we have as follows:
What happens when a nation systematically cuts or underfunds its public health workforce?
We are seeing an answer to that in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping across the United States.
end quotes
And are we ever!
Moving right along:
We write on behalf of the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association, the largest and oldest organization of epidemiologists in the United States, to acknowledge the long hours, determination, and decisive actions of these workers.
Public health is a common good, funded primarily by taxpayer dollars.
Inattention to public health has resulted in a tragedy of the commons in which individuals act in their own self-interest to the detriment of the common good.
end quotes
By way of example, it was in 1938, after a lot of typhoid deaths and deaths due to other communicable diseases that the people of the state of New York went to the polls to vote to amend the New York State Constitution to make the protection and promotion of the health of the PEOPLE a matter of public concern, which Constitutional amendment created the PUBLIC HEALTH INFRASTUCTURE in New York, including the creation of the Rensselaer County Health District in 1946, that the Cuomo’s subsequently dismantled to benefit son Andy’s high-roller land developer/ real estate developer political donors, and it was stepping all over their toes as Rensselaer County Associate Public Health Engineer, including actually having the temerity to bring criminal charges against them in connection with fraudulent claims connected to their land sales that gained me the enmity of the connected-political set in Albany including Mario Cuomo himself.
Getting back to modern times, from that same article we have:
In the case of public health, federal and state politicians and governments have acted like self-interested livestock owners.
But rather than seeking forage for livestock, they have sought financial resources by diverting them from public health agencies and institutions to other priorities.
In this way, federal and state governments have degraded the public health commons to the point of destruction.
And we are all losing out.
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Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is now a case of we have lost out, and big time, because once a bunch of political hacks gut the actual PUBLIC HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE so it can no longer function, especially the PUBLIC HEALTH SURVEILLANCE COMPONENT, and create a public health crisis as they have done, there really is now no orderly, rational way to turn that public health crisis back off to get society running again.
Getting back to that article:
In the United States, per capita spending on public health is less than 3% of total health care expenditures and this amount is projected to fall to 2.4% in 2023.
Preventing the spread of infectious disease is “minimum necessary” or foundational public health service.
Full provision of all foundational public health services is projected to be $54 to $149 per capita.
This pales in comparison to the annual per capita expenditure of $10,739 on medical care.
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Now, speaking as someone who is famous for actually having been there on the front lines as a “first responder” to protect and promote your health as an associate level public health engineer, to the for-profit healthcare industry, you really are worth more to them, dying, but still alive, then you are healthy and free of disease, so public health sentinels like myself were simply gotten rid of, by force in my case, and now we wonder why we have such a huge mess in the country with all these politicians bleating that we never saw this coming, when in fact, we did, and years ago, at that, which again takes us back to that article, to wit:
U.S. preparedness funding is at an unacceptable low.
Federal funds for state, local, and tribal public health preparedness were cut from $940 million in 2002 to $675 million in 2019, and now total about $2 per citizen.
During the same time period, health care emergency preparedness was cut by nearly 50%, from $515 million in 2004 to $265 million in 2019, and is now less than $1 per citizen.
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So, really, people, does anyone want to argue with my premise that we brought this mess on ourselves?
Getting back to that article on that subject, we have:
As the deBeaumont Foundation presciently stated, “In the absence of aligned funding, we are allowing the skills in the governmental public health agency workforce to slowly erode.”
“It may not be immediately noticeable, but there will come a crisis for which we are completely unprepared.”
Last year, several leading medical organizations declared a public health crisis in the health care workforce due to increased workplace demands.
As Covid-19 began, the major strength of our public health system — its people — were not fully supported.
Improvements are not likely to be made without acknowledging the benefits of a strong public health infrastructure and the benefits of public health investment in health promotion and disease prevention.
Future generations should be reaping the rewards of a public health system that is foundational to our collective rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.